Fingertips - Toolset

plot-paris

With all those great plugins, SketchUp's toolbars can get crowded quite quickly, reducing the size of the actual drawing window.
Also, hunting for those small icons across the screen takes time. Surely my cursor could use a break once in a while.

Why not make the tool icons come to the cursor instead? When holding down the space bar a set of tools appears around the cursor. You navigate with your mouse to the desired tool and either click it or release the space bar (while hovering over the tool icon) to activate it.

This tool set can be divided into different sections and labeled for better readability. The user can place any tool whereever he wants to get the perfect individual tool set.

Several tools can be combined to a group: Clicking once will activate the primary tool; clicking and holding your mouse down will open up an additional tool set with all the icons inside the group.

Icon-boundaries can be color-coded to make different icons from the same or a similar tool/plugin visually belong together.

Of course I would love those tool icons to be a bit bigger than SketchUp's native icons. That would make them easier to hit with the mouse, and also give the opportunity to display more information (like writing out the tool name or its assigned shortcut below the icon).

What do you think? That would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

PS: I call it the Fingertips - Toolset... for obvious reasons...

pbacot

Nice Idea. Perhaps the different categories could be expanded when moving the cursor over them instead of showing all categories. Also suspect it should be fully customizable. I remember when favorite program of mine added a contextual menu that had limited items such as "save" "quit" and "revert" (which you never-never want to use on the fly). It was totally useless.

Great thinking.

plot-paris

Absolutely. I imagine the layout to be completely under user control. When you enter setup-mode, you can drag-and-drop any tool icon in there (we would need a big list with all available tools, like the Mac version of SketchUp has).

Some more ideas:

Drag any tool icon around to change its position
Right-click a tool icon to change its color
Drag one icon on top of another to create a group (like with apps on Android and iOS)
Drag an icon on top of the dividing line between sections to create a new one (there don't necessarily have to be four sections, you could have any number that suites you best)
You could go even further to make this tool super powerful:
Double-press and hold the space bar to access a completely unique tool set. Thus with one little extra keypress we double the number of tools available
Maybe this thing doesn't have to be restricted to tool icons. One could place favourite components / textures in there as well. If you use the same handfull of components and textures all the time, this could be brilliant!
Looking at that long list of features I start to think: Maybe this shouldn't be a feature request for a future SketchUp version, but rather for a new plugin...

Box

This thread may be of interest.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=43257